As a deliverable for this grant, we have to create EAC-CPF records for each organization in the collection. The first step in that process is figuring out what organizations are in the collection.

Inventory List Created When Materials Were Organized

When the materials were shipped to us they were completely unorganized. As part of the process of organizing the materials into new folders and archival, we also created an inventory in Excel of each organization that came out of that shipping box (see image above).

We ended up with (after years of work) inventories of nearly 800 boxes that when combined represented about 180,000 lines in an Excel spread sheet. As you can imagine, many of the organizations are repeated throughout the collection.

We combined the organization name column from all of the inventories  (Column D above) into a new spread sheet. Excel can only handle about 65,000 lines and due to the size of our data we had to start with 3 spread sheets. After we pulled all of the organizations out of the original spread sheets, we alphabetized the new spread sheet. By doing this we were able to see which organizations were duplicated throughout the collection.

Organization Lists Combined and Alphabetized

Next, we had to weed out the duplicates. Rather than going through each line in Excel and deleting the duplicates, we used a few tricks. The first step was using the function in Excel “delete all duplicates.” With this function alone we were able to cut the number from 180,000 down to about 75,000. However, this only deleted the lines that were exactly the same.

When looking through the data, we saw that many duplicates still existed due to misspellings and any additional information added to the name of the organization. Excel could not recognize them as the same organization and therefore could not automatically delete them.

Organization List Showing Differences

In the example above you can see that all of these lines are from the same organization but the data in parenthesis makes them unique.  To clean this up, we used the Excel function “Text to Column” and we were able to separate the text out by deliminating the text by a “(“ symbol. In Other words, Excel was able to take everything that occurred after a ( symbol and separate it out. Once the data inside the () was taken out we were able to run the “Delete All Duplicates” function once again and this cut our list from 75,000 down to about 50,000.

Organization List Showing Differences in Spelling and Formatting

However, there was still a lot of weeding to be done. In the example above you can see how many different spellings and formats the Minute Women of the USA had over the years of inventorying the collection.

There was no common factor that we could use to separate out these organizations. We chose to use Google Refine to help clean up the lists. Google Refine is a tool that can be used in various different ways to help clean up data. As you can see in the screen shot below after uploading the spread sheet into Google Refine, it was able to point out different lines of data that are similar.

Google Refine

Using this tool you are able to select which version of the organization you would like to use and then Google Refine goes through and updates the other versions of that name. This process cut the list down to about 40,000 lines. The next step was to go through each line of the spread sheet manually and deleting the duplicates.

In all, the process took about 60 hours to complete and we ended up with about 35,000 unique organization names. The next step will be taking this list of names and creating an authoritative version for each.

As part of this project we are going to be creating EAC-CPF records for each organization contained in the collection.

“Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) primarily addresses the description of individuals, families and corporate bodies that create, preserve, use and are responsible for and/or associated with records in a variety of ways…It supports the linking of information about one agent to other agents to show/discover the relationships amongst record-creating entities, and the linking to descriptions of records and other contextual entities. EAC-CPF is a communication structure for archival contextual information for individuals, corporate bodies and families. It supports the exchange of ISAAR (CPF) compliant authority records.”[1]

EAC is defined as a document type definition (DTD) as well as in an XML Schema and a Relax NG schema. EAC elements reflect the ISAAR(CPF) standard and the ISAD(G), two standards managed by the International Council on Archives. [2]

To save the time in creating an XML file for each of the organizations in the collection we have created a FileMaker Pro database which stores information on each organization and has been customized to export this data in valid EAC-CPF XML. All of the information will either be entered in manually, or pulled imported from other online sources (we are still exploring our options here). The FileMaker Pro database will track information about the background of the organizations, members of the organizations, publications of the organizations, and other archives that have information on the organizations. We determined what information to track based on what is most readily available to our staff within the collection   We anticipate that most of the data in the FileMaker Pro database will be hand entered (meaning not through a script or importing) which in itself is extremely time consuming. However, being able to export the data in a valid EAC XML will save us an immeasurable amount of time.

Below are some screen shots of our FileMaker Pro database. For more information about this work contact Daniel Johnson (Daniel_johnson_1@brown.edu). The database has not been completed and will be worked on throughout the first two years of the grant, but the screen shots below will give a general idea of what will be used to create the EAC-CPF.

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[1] http://eac.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/about/ts-eac-cpf.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoded_Archival_Context

Tab 1: Organizational Background/Authority

In the first tab in the database we can collect information on the background of the organization and enter information regarding authorized versions of the organization’s name. Included here are start dates, end dates, locations, organizational histories, categories, and subjects. In this tab data is used to describe what the organization is and evidence is given to help identify the organizations. In the other tabs in the database we establish the relationship of this organization to other entities.

Tab 2: Members

In the 2nd tab we establish relationships between the organization and people who were members of the organization, by looking through the materials (who wrote the articles, who is mentioned as members) and doing additional research. We can include what a persons role in the organization was and when they were involved. This helps create connections between different organizations within the collection (many people are members of multiple organizations) and with outside collections. By using authorized forms of a person’s name (LoC) eventually these names can be cross referenced against archival holdings within other institutions as well as other collections held by Brown University.

Tab 3: Publications

This database is also structured to track the publications in the collection that each organization has issued. Due to the size of the collection (700,000 items) it is unlikely that we will be able to input the title of all of the publications however, simply entering the dates of the publications will create useful connections. In many cases the organizations in this collection are obscure and very difficult to research. By looking at when things were published the major dates of existence for an organization can be established  This also helps establish connections between different organizations. For example after dates have been entered researchers can explore questions like “what was being published in 1958?” and “who was publishing it?” on the extreme right and left. This makes issues that were topical at a particular time in history easier to explore across a wide variety of organizations.

Tab 4: Related Archival Collections

This tab will be used to list other archives that have collections created by or about organizations in the Hall-Hoag collection. Although this tab will not be often used (due to the size of the collection and the difficulty in finding collections online) it was developed because in some cases the connections will be obvious and the information would be very valuable for researchers.

Tab 5: EAC-CPF Creation

The final tab in the database is used to create the XML data. By clicking the button “Craete EAC-CPF” the text box below is filled with a valid EAC-CPF file created using the data entered into the database. The text in this field can be copy/pasted into Oxygen to be view, edited and saved. In addition this database also has scripts in place that can create EAC-CPF records for each organization in the database and save them to a specified location on a shared drive at Brown University. This allows us to make whole sale changes to our EAC-CPF code and update each record en masse. A pdf version of some sample data is attached.

American Nazi Party EAC